Flickr Search Hack Powered by Mouse-Made Doodles 79
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Retrievr gives budding artists an impractical but addictive way to find photographs on Flickr: a search engine powered exclusively by mouse-made doodles. From the article: 'Retrievr, Mr. Langreiter says, "doesn't look at specific forms." Art history buffs might like to think of it as photo-search by way of Impressionism. The Retrievr engine dissects a photo like a gallery connoisseur who lost his bifocals: It focuses on regions of colors rather than specific shapes and lines. "It is, actually, a simple scheme," says Mr. Langreiter. Retrievr creates and stores a compact representation of each photo in its database. The system pulls only the most important features — broad shapes, blocks of color and spatial relationships between different colored areas — out of detailed images to create shorthand approximations of every photo. (The storage mechanism extracts the 120 "strongest" features from an image to create something called a "wavelet transform," which contains much less data than the photo itself and facilitates lightning-fast searches.)'"
Flickr Retrievr (Score:5, Informative)
Requires Flash.
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Re:Flickr Retrievr (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Flickr Retrievr (Score:4, Funny)
In its current incarnation, Retrievr runs on a single computer.
Ow. The Slashdotting. It hurts.
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That was quick (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah that would be great, but I guess we'll just have to wait until AOL buys them out.
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http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/taor?c=1 [systemone.at]
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Seriously though... (Score:3, Insightful)
For those of us that run xscreensaver, one of the hacks goes out and gets random images from the web. I had to turn that one off because, random or not, it was getting porn everytime it ran. Now, I'm not a prude, I'm not concerned if my 5 year old son sees the image of a naked woman on my computer screen. To have a problem with that is to have a
Free speech and .xxx (Score:2)
That theory only works if you legally require that all porn be on .xxx domains. Otherwise you're still going to need to worry. Given that free speech protection has been extended to porn, demanding a subset of free speech to s
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As for it not being a perfect solution....conceeded...but it would help enough to be worth it. Finally, it is my understanding that most porn sites want the
What remains are a whole slew of other site that still require adult supervision....but what doesn't.
I support the
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FFS! (Score:1, Funny)
are there no nipples on flickr?
Combo of Retrievr & Online Dating (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Combo of Retrievr & Online Dating (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Combo of Retrievr & Online Dating (Score:1)
hmmmmm
That was quick (Score:5, Interesting)
But this is an interesting idea, fun if nothing else.
I drew a tree and I got a pineapple with a guy's face in it, a chinese guy standing in front of a gate, and a dragonfly. Maybe I need to brush up on my drawing skills.
*groan*
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I get it!
It's been done before (Score:5, Informative)
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Or maybe they could use the Mexican Hat wavelet. That one is
Re:It's been done before (Score:5, Informative)
I'm just saying what imgSeek uses. It's certainly a very easy wavelet to implement via lifting. I think it's probably used because more complex wavelets wouldn't be of any help since the rough drawing is so rough to begin with. In the end you could probably do the same thing with a DCT. Wish I had time to experiment.
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And I saw at least two demos fo similar systems (it's what prompted me to give imgseek a try) for searching image collections (one was draw what you want to find, the other was more pick from displayed images to extract features to search for). That was at least 2 years ago - since I left that country tha
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Yea, I hate to preempt any of the people who have come up with things like this, but I hope no one tries to patent any of these ideas. It's sort of a process that's implicitly defined by the existence multiresolution image decomposition. We shall see.
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Yeah, well, the purchasing process implicitly defined by the existence of an item for sale, a website entry of that item and a mouse button, didn't stop a certain company to patent a certain process utilising a certain number of mouse click(s).
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Ah, the web site doesn't work, but at least we get really nice feeling sheets!
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powered by mouse-made doodles (Score:1)
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First they created mice who don't age [slashdot.org].
Not realizing what they were doing, they placed live human brain cells [slashdot.org] in the mouse's brain.
Then they made the mouse always happy [slashdot.org], and gave it its own complete genetic map [slashdot.org].
Suddenly we find a new mouse species [slashdot.org].
And now they can search the web better than humans. Will someone please welcome our new overlords?
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*cough* *ahem* ... "with frickin' laser beams".
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Applied to museums? (Score:4, Funny)
To find Pollocks, draw a can of paint.
To find Warhols, draw four cans of paint.
To find modern art sculptures, throw the tablet against a wall.
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Tits (Score:1)
Other flickr Mashups (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the link: Ten Best Flickr Mashups [webmonkey.com]
O-o-old (Score:2, Informative)
Rating the doodles (Score:4, Informative)
But the real question is... (Score:1)
Mouse-made what?? (Score:2)
Finally, a good use for surplus mouse poop!
Feature Vector (Score:3, Interesting)
The MPAA can use this (Score:2)
Some kind of first-pass search system to find rough matches between Flickr/Youtube/etc posts and copyrighted material will be a big win for the MPAA. There are ways to align and compare pictures, but they're computationally expensive and compare two images, they don't do a general search. This thing might be usable as a first search used to find possible matches, which then get a more detailed examination by the expensive algorithm.
I failed! (Score:1)
I think it needs some bugs worked out. It searches as well as a search engine.
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Wavelet Transforms (Score:2)
Bob
arabs first (Score:2)
wavelet first (Score:3, Informative)
Does it work? Yes! (Score:1)
Urg (Score:4, Informative)
I mean, 'something called a wavelet transform'. A short explanation linking it Fourier might have been apt, but wavelets are hardly voodoo.
'facilitates lightning-fast searches'.. oohh, thanks for telling us. I would never have guessed that after transforming the data down to 12 vectors, searching would be a lot faster. I mean, if they actually had indexed the data in a clever way or something specifically to speed up searches, this sentence would have made sense.. but they just transformed it. It's not voodoo and market-speech is bad!
Google? (Score:1)
I used to assume that, being the current king of text search, Google would be expanding into more intelligent media searches, like this kind of 'similar image'-search, automatic tagging (like automatically indexing a picture 'nature' and 'winter'), and searching for songs by entering a couple of notes.
They never did though, a
Failure (Score:2)
Im Suprised (Score:1)
Oblig. (Score:2)
"Same thing we do every night Pinky, try and take over the world! We shall create millions of doodles which will keep the world's intelligence services occupied long enough for us to take over without opposition."
Seems Like... (Score:2)
Same Type of idea for 3D Models (Score:1)
http://shape.cs.princeton.edu/search.html [princeton.edu]
an interesting note about color (Score:1)
The interesting thing about color is that it is good enough ("Voxel 4" was our best if you find our website) to find images that have been resized, run through *some* effects filters, or rotated.
So if you use the same usericon etc, resized, on unconnected websites, that could be used to correlate your identities once this feature is in a global search engine. Also, the clustering of related imag
Please tell me (Score:1)
Wavelets and doodling searches (Score:2)
I then corresponded briefly with Ingrid Daubechies of AT&T who brought
Energy source? (Score:1)